Christmas Evans

Christmas Evans was born on December 25, 1766, in the village of Esgair-wen, in the parish of Llandysul in Cardiganshire, Wales. He was named for the day of his birth. His father, a shoemaker, died when he was young, and his mother was too poor to keep the family together. Christmas was sent to live with an uncle, a hard man who made him work as a farm laborer and who treated him cruelly. He did not learn to read as a child, and he grew up rough and undisciplined.

As a young man he fell in with a wild group and took part in fights and rough sport. In one of these brawls, he was hit by a heavy blow and lost the sight of one eye. This injury marked him for life. He was soon drawn into the religious revival that was moving through the Welsh countryside. In 1783 he heard a sermon at a nearby chapel and was converted. He was then seventeen. He learned to read in the church and began to study the Bible. He later taught himself Latin and Greek with the help of friends.

He began to preach at an early age. His speech was powerful, and he had a vivid imagination. In 1789 he was ordained as a Baptist minister, and in 1791 he was sent to the island of Anglesey in North Wales. He found a small and divided Baptist work there. He settled in a poor cottage and went from place to place, preaching in homes and in fields. He walked long distances and slept in barns, and over the years the Baptist churches of the island grew. He traveled the whole length of Wales, and crowds gathered wherever he went. People spoke of his gift for painting pictures in words, so that his hearers felt as if they were witnessing the scenes he described.

His life was not without trouble. In the early years of the nineteenth century he went through a time of spiritual decline. He became involved in a controversy over a point of doctrine, and the dispute left him cold and bitter. He described this as a time of drought. In 1802, while traveling over the mountains of Cader Idris, he felt a renewal of his heart. He stopped on the mountainside and made a solemn covenant with God, in which he gave himself again to the Lord's service, and he wrote out the terms of it. From that day he was again filled with a new fire, and his preaching had a fresh power.

He served in several Welsh churches, including in Caernarfon and Cardiff. He was in great demand as a preacher, and he preached with such power that people wept and cried out. He had a gift for allegory and could carry a theme from the Old Testament and the New together. He left behind a collection of sermons, which was translated into English and widely read.

He struggled with poverty and with the burden of debt for the church buildings, and he spent time collecting money in South Wales to pay them off. This was hard and humbling work, and he was criticized by some for being absent from his congregation. He also faced loneliness after the death of his first wife. He remarried and kept going.

He died on July 19, 1838, in Swansea, after preaching the previous evening. He was seventy-one. He had been used to establish the Baptists in North Wales and left a name that lasted. His life shows that a rough and uneducated youth can be raised by grace to be a mighty voice, and that even after a time of drought, the Lord can renew a man's heart.